No matter what your grades are, trust that life will deliver

IT’S THAT time of year again when exam results come out – last week it was the A-levels and this week we see GCSE results.

I still remember vividly receiving all of my results, from GCSE to degree and beyond and the fear of what would happen if I didn’t get the results that I thought I needed.

I did what we all do when we are young and of course many carry this on in our adult years too – we plan what we want to happen and then start to fear what will happen if or when it doesn’t work out that way.

I remember standing with my husband outside the Law Department office and getting him to look at the list of degree results because I didn’t want to know the result if it wasn’t what I thought I needed, because I had told myself that story that life would only be OK if I got that particular result.

It wasn’t until many years later that I realised that life doesn’t work like that.

I remember that when I got my GCSE and A-level results. I was all set to go to university, having been told by career advice that people like me, from my background, didn’t become barristers, which is another story, I’d decided that I would love to study English, however, while my English results were good, some of my other GCSE results weren’t as good, and my A-level results were even worse. I felt completely lost, deflated and just thought I had completely messed up my entire life.

What I didn’t know was that some months later I was to get a training job at a local authority, where I would meet my future husband, my partner in crime, my soulmate. It would be he who believed in me and I in him, he who supported my dream of becoming a barrister, and together we would support each other in creating a life that we love.

I have always said that being with him is like being able to create an amazing life story where each day is a new sheet, a new start, a new opportunity. Had I read English at university, at that time, I simply wouldn’t have met him, so I can’t say with any certainty that I would have become a barrister, travelled as extensively as I have, had three amazing children, live in a fabulous town or now have an amazing career as a life coach. Everytime that life hasn’t worked out as ‘I’ had planned, it has done so for a very clear reason, a reason that wasn’t clear to me at the time, but has become clear as the years have gone by.

As Steve Jobs famously said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” So if you’ve not had the results that you’d hoped for over the past two weeks – or perhaps if you’re over 18 and something hasn’t worked out as you’d hoped – have faith, that perhaps, this time, the path you had chosen wasn’t right for you at this time, but that something more wonderful, more life-changing, may well be just around the corner.

You may not see it now, or even in the next few years, but there will be a point in your life when it will all make perfect sense. ■